FFT/FFTA/2 is more grind friendly. You can just grind grind grind and pwn everything in sight.
Fire Emblem not so much; you can permanently lose units, your weapons break, more tactics oriented than FFT series.

Personally I'd recommend FFTA2. It improved everything that FFTA had to offer, and since you said you didn't like FFT.

Also, you could wait for Disgaea as well. Disgaea offers as much freedom in terms of doing side missions, grinding, and stuff.

Since you're in the GBA section, Super Robot Taisen 1+2 are tactical games that are pretty straight forward. There is a lot of dialog, but as I recall it was all skippable and you won't miss anything because the story is poor.

Shining Force is also one of the original tactics games, and there happens to be one on the GBA. They lend themselves to pretty casual gameplay because the characters are defined so you need not concern yourself with managing their development. You'll pretty much just go from battle to battle, choose your characters, then fight.

I wouldn't recommend Fire Emblem for the fact that they're probably the most challenging tactics games around. Its worth visiting some time just because they're also the original (see Fire Emblem Gaiden for the NES) but only after you're familiar with the genre. They're all ostensibly the same exact game, so it doesn't really matter which one you choose.

Tactics Ogre are essentially the under appreciated, superior games where this genre is concerned. Tactics Ogre was an overall much better game than FFTA, so when you've played some of these you may come to appreciate this fact. There was also a SNES one that was localized in a PSX port if you're ever interested in checking it out.

On the DS, the tactics games that come to mind and available in english are Hoshigami Remix, Luminous Arc, and FFTA2.

I would definitely recommend the Advance Wars series, they're more on the tactical side instead of role playing, and are widely accessible to people not typically interested in tactics games. And you've got plenty from which to choose--two on the GBA and two on the DS.

Defintely start with Advance Wars or FFTA. Then work your way up to Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem in my opinion is the superior series(although I"m a huge AW fan). Like has been mentioned, you can permanently lose your characters. So just because of this, you try everything you can do to keep them alive since. The game does an excellent job making you get attached to your players, and you'll definitely not want to lose any of them. The stories are great too. It's just an all around excellent series.

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